President Trump dialed up pressure on Ukraine to swiftly accept a U.S.-designed peace plan, hardening his position toward the embattled country and its European backers, who insist U.S. security guarantees are vital to a peace deal.
Exacerbating tensions between Europe and Washington, Trump lambasted European leaders as “weak” and said Russia holds the cards in any peace negotiation with Ukraine.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky “is going to have to get on the ball and start accepting things,” Trump said late Monday in an interview with Politico, adding that Ukraine “is losing.”
Russia is slowly advancing on the battlefield at a massive cost to men and materiel.
Zelensky earlier on Monday said he wasn’t willing to concede Ukrainian land to Russia despite U.S. pressure to do so. He echoed what European officials have said for days: Without clear security guarantees, including a U.S. commitment to backstop European forces, it is risky for Ukraine to make significant concessions and for Europe to follow through on the security guarantees it has worked on.
“The strongest security guarantees we can get are from the United States,” Zelensky said Monday while traveling from London to Brussels. He said they can’t be “empty promises, but legally binding, voted through the U.S. Congress.”
Zelensky said the issue was under discussion. Ukraine and European national-security advisers worked on another version of the proposal which is now ready to present to the U.S., he said Tuesday on X. “Together with the American side, we expect to swiftly make the potential steps as doable as possible,” he wrote.
Many European officials have said privately that differences among Russia, the U.S. and Ukraine on the core issues could require weeks or months to resolve unless there is a major change on the battlefield.
The peace talks have already passed a Thanksgiving deadline set by Trump. While the U.S. is pressing Ukraine to move, Trump has said it faces no specific deadline.
“We know the Americans want quick results,” said a senior European official. “On the other hand it is difficult to imagine, with [the] complexity of the issues on the table, how we can have quick results.”
Senior Trump administration officials insist they aren’t pushing Ukraine into a deal it dislikes. The goal, they say, is an agreement acceptable to both parties that ensures Ukraine’s sovereignty and defends it for the long term.
U.S. officials point to days of direct negotiations between Zelensky’s national-security adviser, Rustem Umerov, and top Trump negotiators Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner as evidence that Washington’s intent isn’t to sell out Kyiv.
A U.S. official said three major sticking points have been identified: which territory Ukraine should surrender to Russia as part of the peace plan; whether Ukraine can ever join the North Atlantic Treaty Organization; and how Russian assets currently immobilized in Western Europe can be used to pay for Ukraine’s reconstruction.
The official said an early provision barring Kyiv from acceding to NATO has been removed from the current peace plan, though the new version doesn’t address the issue at all.
The White House didn’t immediately reply to a request for comment on the discussions.
The talks come against a backdrop of plummeting trust between Europe’s top leaders and Washington. A new U.S. national-security strategy said European leaders “hold unrealistic expectations” of how the Ukraine war could end. It also accused the EU and European national governments of suppressing free speech and permitting large-scale immigration.
European leaders have said this month that Ukraine must be wary of the U.S. approach to ending the war, saying they should play a role in shaping the outcome of the conflict.
Write to Laurence Norman at laurence.norman@wsj.com, Anastasiia Malenko at anastasiia.malenko@wsj.com and Alexander Ward at alex.ward@wsj.com